Movie business declares war

Hold on to your helmet and keep your head down - movie violence is back in vogue.

In the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks on America, Hollywood bent over backwards to avoid being seen as insensitive.

Movie industry moguls decided that people would not want to watch war movies or action thrillers.

Apollo 13 producer Brian Grazer summed up the feeling when he said: 'People will look toward more escapism, more comedies, more dramas about family love.'

Films such as Collateral Damage - which stars Arnold Schwarzenegger as a man whose family is killed in an attack on a Los Angeles skyscraper - were put on hold.

Now, however, audiences are recovering their appetite for gung-ho patriotism and explosive derring-do.

This weekend sees the release in the UK of Behind Enemy Lines. It stars Owen Wilson as a US airman shot down by missiles over Bosnia and it is unashamedly and flag-wavingly patriotic.

It proved immensely popular in America and US critics dubbed it Top Gun Goes To The Balkans. On the December weekend it was released, it was second only to Harry Potter in takings at the box office.

Collateral Damage, meanwhile, has been rescued from the shelf and will hit screens in February.

And Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down is to be released in the UK on January 18. It tells the story of America's disastrous military adventure in Somalia in the early 1990s.

It stars Ewan McGregor and was produced by Jerry Bruckheimer - the man responsible for Top Gun and Pearl Harbour.

Although Scott has described it as an anti-war film, the Los Angeles Times found it a 'pitiless, unrelenting, no-excuses war movie' and pronounced it 'exhilarating'.

In March we can look forward to Mel Gibson in We Were Soldiers, a Vietnam War tale which is a cross between Custer's Last Stand and Platoon.

And later in the year we can expect Windtalkers, starring Nicolas Cage and Christian Slater - a Second World War drama about marines protecting native American soldiers who speak the Navajo language which was being used to convey coded messages.